Web Hosting Plans
We offer different Web hosting plans to meet different needs, from a small personal site to a busy business site.
Our lowest priced plan offers the features most of our customers need. If you need more disk space, or you have a particularly busy site, you can choose a larger plan.
You can specify the plan you want on the order form when you sign up. Even better, you can switch plans at any time with no penalty just by contacting us, so your plan can grow as your site grows.
The table below shows the details of the plans we offer.
Silver Hosting (discontinued; not available to new customers) |
Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Monthly price (prepaid annually) | $9.95 | $11.95 | $14.45 | $17.95 |
Monthly price (billed monthly) | $10.95 | $12.95 | $15.95 | $19.95 |
Free .com, .net or .org domain name | ||||
Setup fee | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
Required contract length | none – cancel any time | none – cancel any time | none – cancel any time | none – cancel any time |
Host extra domain names | – | up to 10 extra | up to 15 extra | up to 25 extra |
Disk space and bandwidth | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
SSD disk space | 30 GB (30000 MB) | 42 GB (42000 MB) | 70 GB (70000 MB) | 100 GB (100000 MB) |
Unmetered Bandwidth | ||||
Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting | |
POP and IMAP mailboxes | 50 | 100 | 150 | 250 |
E-mail forwarding | ||||
Webmail access | ||||
E-mail virus scanning | ||||
E-mail spam filtering | ||||
Autoresponders | ||||
Mailman mailing lists | 5 lists 200 subscribers per list 5,000 total deliveries/mo |
10 lists 400 subscribers per list 10,000 total deliveries/mo |
15 lists 600 subscribers per list 15,000 total deliveries/mo |
25 lists 1,000 subscribers per list 25,000 total deliveries/mo |
Outgoing e-mail | 10,000 total deliveries | 20,000 total deliveries | 30,000 total deliveries | 50,000 total deliveries |
Website basics | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
Web site statistics | ||||
Unlimited subdomains | ||||
WordPress | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
WordPress hosting | ||||
Free WordPress migration | ||||
Backups | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
Daily backups | ||||
Unlimited self-restores | ||||
Free assisted restores | 1 per year | 1 per year | 1 per year | 2 per year |
Databases and advanced features | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
MySQL databases | 20 | 40 | 60 | 200 |
PHP script support | ||||
Perl CGI script support | ||||
Script CPU time | 10% | 25% | 50% | 75% |
SSH Linux shell access | ||||
SSL certificates | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
Let's Encrypt SSL certificate | — | free | free | free |
AlphaSSL single hostname certificate | — | $2.00 / month | $2.00 / month | $2.00 / month |
AlphaSSL wildcard certificate | — | $5.00 / month | $5.00 / month | $5.00 / month |
Extra resources (cost per month) | Silver Hosting | Basic Hosting | Plus Hosting | Business Hosting |
Extra disk space | $0.40 / GB | $0.40 / GB | $0.40 / GB | $0.40 / GB |
Extra POP mailboxes | $0.50 each | $0.50 each | $0.50 each | not available |
Extra MySQL databases | $0.50 each | $0.50 each | $0.50 each | $0.50 each |
Extra Script CPU time | $0.50 per 1% | $0.50 per 1% | $0.50 per 1% | $0.50 per 1% |
Dedicated IP address | $2.00 | $2.00 | $2.00 | $2.00 |
Monthly price
Our low monthly price is all you pay for Web hosting and e-mail service with a free .com, .net or .org domain name. There are no setup fees, and no fees for the most common domain names.
If you choose to prepay annually, you'll receive a discount of $1.00 a month or more. (There's no risk — you can cancel at any time and receive an automatic refund for the unused portion of the prepayment.)
Free domain name
All of our Web hosting plans include completely free domain name registration and renewal for domain names ending in common suffixes like .com, .net and .org). You won't have to pay another company a fee for the domain name.
That means your Web site includes a custom address like www.example.com, and you'll be able to receive e-mail messages at addresses such as address@example.com (where example.com is the domain name of your choice, of course).
Setup fee
We never charge a setup fee. The monthly fee is all you'll pay for normal usage.
Contract length
We don't force you to commit to a fixed contract length of several months or a year, like many companies. You can cancel our service at any time (even in the middle of a billing month) and pay only for what you've used.
Host extra domain names
You can host "Add-On" domain names at a lower price.
Disk space
Disk space is the amount of space taken up by your Web site files, e-mail messages, databases, Web logs, and other files on our servers.
An average Web site uses less than 1 GB. Even our least expensive plan includes far more than that, so you'll have plenty of room to grow. If you ever need more, you can upgrade to a larger plan.
(We'll warn you by e-mail if you start using more disk space than is included in your plan — you won't be taken by surprise by any extra fees.)
We use only solid state drives (SSDs) in RAID 1 arrays for your files, e-mail, and databases. This provides superior disk performance compared to old-style spinning disks.
Daily backups
We make daily backups that you can access yourself or ask our staff to restore if you need help. Our backups page has more details.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred by our servers for your account, per month. The more visitors your Web site has, and the larger your files are, the more bandwidth you'll use.
All our plans include "unmetered bandwidth". We include enough bandwidth for almost any site — and unlike some other companies, we never charge extra bandwidth fees. Our bandwidth policy page has more details.
POP and IMAP mailboxes
A "POP" or "IMAP" mailbox is simply a standard e-mail mailbox. With a mailbox, your messages will wait on our server until you read them using a standard mail program on your computer, such as Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, or Apple Mail, or by using our Webmail system at mail.tigertech.net.
You'll normally use one mailbox for each person who receives e-mail. For example, if your domain name is "example.com", and two people — Robert and Mollie — will be reading e-mail, you will probably use two POP e-mail mailboxes, "robert@example.com" and "mollie@example.com".
If you need more mailboxes than your plan includes, you can upgrade to a larger plan, or you can pay a small extra fee for additional mailboxes as shown under extra resources above. (Note that you can't exceed the number of mailboxes listed for the largest plan, though, for technical reasons; you should use a dedicated mail hosting company if you need more.)
E-mail forwarding addresses
An e-mail forwarding address simply forwards mail to another address. The other address can be one or more mailboxes on our servers, or can be on another server (such as an AOL or GMail address).
For example, if your domain name is "example.com", you could set up an extra e-mail address named "sales@example.com" that forwards mail to both "robert@example.com" and "example@aol.com".
You can create up to 1,000 e-mail forwarding addresses with our hosting plans. (We actually don't limit the number, but managing them becomes unwieldy if you have more than about 1,000.)
Webmail access
You can use our Webmail pages to send and receive e-mail messages from any Web browser. It's full-featured (including address books, spell checking, and more) but simple to use.
Webmail is great for checking your mail from an Internet cafe on vacation. Some people even use it as the only way they read e-mail because they don't want to bother setting up a normal e-mail program.
E-mail virus scanning
All incoming e-mail is checked for viruses using the ClamAV antivirus scanner, with virus patterns updated hourly.
This system prevents almost all e-mail viruses from reaching your mailbox. (Of course, you should still use antivirus software on your own computer to protect against viruses from other sources, such as software you download.)
E-mail spam filtering
You can turn on our powerful spam filtering for any e-mail address. This eliminates a great deal of the spam you would otherwise receive.
As an extra step, we also tag all incoming messages with SpamAssassin, allowing advanced users to perform additional spam filtering in their own mail program.
E-mail autoresponders
You can add an autoresponder to any e-mail address you create. Some people use this to automatically send a reply like "I'm hiking in Antarctica until December 26" when they're out of the office on vacation, and some businesses use this feature to set up a response such as "We have received your message and will respond within 24 hours" for sales e-mail addresses.
Our autoresponders are smarter than most: you can even tell them to automatically stop sending a response after a certain number of days — you won't have to remember to turn it off when you get back from a trip.
Mailing lists
Our service allows you to create mailing lists, which are special e-mail addresses that forward mail to many recipients. A mailing list can be used for group discussion lists (where everyone on the list can send a message to everyone else) or announcement lists (where only the list owner can send messages).
We use the powerful GNU Mailman software to handle mailing lists. Mailman includes the following features:
- Recipients can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, either by visiting a Web page or by sending an e-mail message to a special address.
- Messages can be archived so they can be viewed later on the Web.
- Group discussion lists can be "moderated", allowing you to review and approve each message. This gives you the opportunity to reject spam and other inappropriate content before your subscribers see it.
- User-initiated subscriptions are automatically confirmed by the Mailman software (this process is sometimes called "double opt-in"), protecting you against false spam accusations.
- You can create private lists so that people can't subscribe without your approval.
- Subscribers can choose to receive messages grouped together in "digest" form, cutting down on the number of messages they receive.
- Much of the routine work involved in running a mailing list (such as unsubscribing invalid addresses) is automatically handled for you.
Although Mailman is often considered a complicated program to set up, our simple "wizard" allows you to get started right away by answering a few easy questions.
Mailing list limits
There are three limits on mailing lists: the total number of lists you can create, the number of subscribers that can be on each list, and the total number of messages delivered per month. The limits are shown above.
The number of subscribers is the maximum number of subscribers for each list.
The number of message deliveries is simply the number of subscribers multiplied by the number of messages sent. For example, an announcement list with 500 subscribers and one message sent every five days would result in about 3,000 deliveries per month (500 subscribers x 6 messages per month). Similarly, a group discussion list with 100 subscribers and five messages sent per day would be about 15,000 message deliveries per month (100 subscribers x 5 messages x 30 days).
(A frequent question we receive about mailing lists is "Can I use a mailing list to send unsolicited bulk e-mail?" The answer is no, you cannot; we have an extremely strict anti-spam policy that prohibits sending any unsolicited mail.)
Outgoing e-mail limits
Each plan has a limit on how many outgoing e-mail messages can be sent each month. This limit includes messages sent via Mailman and any other mailing list program.
Web site statistics
Once your Web site is running, you'll want to know how many people are visiting your site. We provide the AWStats Web statistics program preinstalled for all accounts — you can use it to see how many people have viewed your Web site, which pages are most popular, what search phrases people use to find your site, which pages visitors came from, which countries your visitors are in, and more.
If you prefer to use your own Web statistics program, the raw Web server logs are also available to you at no extra charge.
Subdomains
Subdomains give you the ability to display different Web sites to visitors who type custom domain names. For example, if your domain name is "example.com", you could display a different Web site to people who visit "sales.example.com" instead of "www.example.com". Another use of subdomains is creating personal Web sites for family members, such as "robert.example.com" and "mollie.example.com".
Our subdomain feature is easy to use: just create a new folder at the top level of your Web site and that folder becomes a subdomain. You can create a subdomain like "sales.example.com" by simply creating a folder named "sales".
Our plans include unlimited subdomains that work the moment you create the folder (unlike many Web hosting companies that limit the number of subdomains or require that you wait before they're activated).
SSL certificates (secure Web site)
If you're planning on collecting encrypted information from your visitors, such as credit card numbers, you'll want your Web site to use SSL security to activate the secure lock icon of your visitor's Web browser.
See our SSL help page for more details about SSL.
Dedicated IP address
Dedicated IP addresses are available for an extra fee. See our dedicated IP page for more details.
MySQL databases
Our plans include MySQL databases, allowing you to install scripts that can quickly manipulate and store large amounts of data. As an example, the popular WordPress blog and content management system uses MySQL, and works well with our servers.
As a general rule, each separate database script you use will require a separate MySQL database, although some scripts might be able to share databases.
Databases are stored on solid state drive (SSD) RAID arrays for performance and reliability.
PHP script support
All our hosting plans offer extensive PHP script support. This allows you to use a wide variety of scripts written by other people (such as WordPress, phpBB, and many free e-commerce shopping carts). You can even create scripts yourself.
Perl CGI script support
All our hosting plans support CGI scripts written in Perl.
We also provide two useful CGI scripts that are preinstalled for all our customers and require no additional setup:
The first script can collect data from your Web page and mail it to you — it's (a more spam-proof version of) the standard FormMail script. You can use this for feedback forms, newsletter signups, and the like.
The second useful script is a snazzy hit counter script that allows you to display the number of hits to your pages.
Script CPU time
Our servers run scripts for many Web sites, so your scripts can't use the full resources of a server all the time. That's okay, though, because your Web site probably won't need to run scripts all the time (it will be idle between visitors).
The numbers shown on this page are the average limits of what you can use. For example, if you have a script that takes half a second to run, and that script runs once every 50 seconds, then that script is using an average of 1% of the available "CPU time" (of one core of a 2.40 GHz Xeon E5-2630 v3 processor, which we call a CPU Unit).
Many well-written scripts run in just a fraction of a second: if a script takes 0.03 seconds to run and is loaded 1200 times an hour, that would be 1% (because it uses a total of 36 seconds of CPU time every 3600 seconds).
It's rare for a site to use more than 1% of available CPU time. In our experience, only very busy sites, or sites with fairly resource-intensive scripts, use more. (We don't recommend very busy sites that consistently use more than 25% CPU time for "shared hosting" servers like ours. You'd probably want a "dedicated server" from another company instead.)
SSH Linux shell access
Our hosting plans all include powerful Linux shell access. This allows advanced users to harness the power of the Unix command line to setup scripts and perform other tasks.